


please don't say I'm going alone

by shanegray



Series: oxford comma [2]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Boarding School, Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, han leia and luke and their first year apart is the theme, hey guys im back with the au nobody ever asked for but i'm gonna keep thinking about anyway, john green won a printz award for him trying to stay connected to his boarding school why cant i
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-23
Updated: 2019-05-23
Packaged: 2020-05-28 15:55:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,288
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19397413
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shanegray/pseuds/shanegray
Summary: The floorboards creak and the sun comes through the french doors facing the empty yard. Han watches her pace as he starts to take a backseat to his entire life.





	please don't say I'm going alone

**Author's Note:**

> If you're so inclined, the playlist that goes with this au is [ here](https://open.spotify.com/user/sasimljemihuddy/playlist/7aiXnn8FUFgssUUYSBBsqR?si=kvPTi-rFSkeWUiwZrKMqIg)

It was less than an hour drive from Brown to Northeastern and then an hour back again, and Leia will tell you straight up that there was very little emphasis on that fact when considering her final decision on where to enroll the fall of her Freshman year.

Maybe it hadn’t been a _coincidence_ , sure. Maybe it was suspicious seeing as Han had spent the year after graduation killing time in their sleepy prep school town on the coast of southern Maine. Maybe she spent weekends off campus holed up in his dinky little sublet on the outskirts of Manchester wrapped in his oversized Ikea duvet and her old cotton underwear and maybe holding the bong Han had bought off a vendor the last time he’d gone back to New York.

(They stay in the area another month after her graduation before subsequently following Luke back to Bethesda and to the house they grew up in. They say it’s because Han had a month left of his lease he didn’t wanna give up, which was true.

It had more to do with this the last time they had to spend every moment together.)

* * *

Leaving comes in droves. Luke’s orientation comes first, the second week of August. Luke and Leia cry in his bedroom the night before he leaves for NYU, suddenly faced with the reality of a separation they managed to avoid when he decided to follow her to boarding school what feels like a lifetime ago. He gives her a photobook of shots he’s taken the last four years. It might be the best gift she’s ever gotten.

Leia climbs into her bed near 3 am to find Han fast asleep. He stirs when the mattress dips, the metal frame creaking ever so slightly. She lays staring at the ceiling until suddenly she’s awake and it’s three in the afternoon and her dad and brother have taken the family car and Leia’s left wandering the house feeling like a ghost.

The floorboards creak and the sun comes through the french doors facing the empty yard. Han watches her pace as he starts to take a backseat to his entire life.

* * *

September happens fast once they’ve both moved into their new homes. They agree to spend the first month completely apart, to give themselves a chance to settle in and make friends.

It’s constant texting, calling, facetiming. They trade messages like a stream of consciousness, with _i just saw a guy with a sticker for that band you like,_ and _do you remember if we decided i’m allergic to mangoes,_ and sometimes just _i miss you so fucking much i don’t know what to do with myself_.

Leia’s a member of four new clubs and teams by the end of the month. Han thinks he might know where his textbooks are somewhere.

He makes the drive to Providence on a whim for the first time October 1st. The shock of finding him outside her building lasts maybe half a second before her face is buried in his chest and he ducks his head so her hair is against his cheek and they trade breathless affirmations like they’ve been away at war. _I missed you, I missed you, I love you._

Leia takes him to the crowded pizza place down the road and Han ducks into a liquor store and comes out with a bottle of wine. They drink it on the floor of her dorm room with her laptop open to a show they never got around to finishing and things feel so, so much better, but so far from right.

She tells him excitedly about her first week after making it onto the speech and debate team. Han tells her about not being able to find a place to park the Falcon this afternoon. Leia tells him about her intro to comparative politics professor. He kisses her and lets them strip each other bare in a too small twin bed because he thinks that might be the only common ground they have left.

She takes the train to Boston to visit him the following weekend, despite midterms starting the next Monday. It doesn’t fail to dawn on him how significant the act is, how her putting him before her coursework speaks volumes, and it’s the first time his dull single in a mostly unfamiliar city feels like home.

* * *

November Leia’s averaging about four hours of sleep. On more than one occasion she’s woken up in the library in a panic to find her laptop dark and a graveyard of highlighters scattered over her carrel.

Being here is wonderful. No matter how much Leia had loved the tiny hub where she spent her adolescence, the feeling of a four year high stakes audition for college was always present. The looming knowledge that one day it would all end in a series of letters telling her whether or not it had all been worth it making everything feel like a race.

Leia wakes up in a room with sturdy windows and laminate flooring almost like what she had junior and senior year of high school, but without the added bonus of the cool tiles being heated in the winter. The commons make her feel like she’s stepped into the 70’s with their bright and funky furniture, but the high ceilings make it clear to her that this is all a dream.

She eats breakfast in a dining hall where she does not have to stop and check in with someone on duty. She works out in a gym where she isn’t liable to run into her calculus teacher on the treadmill. She sits in a lecture hall with her macbook on full brightness and her hand in the air. While the work is grueling, humbling, the lines for office hours way too long for the single question she plans to ask but knows she’ll be talking for twenty minutes, its freeing.

She did it. She’s here.

Leia misses Maine. She misses her friends and teachers. She misses the familiar drive to Portland on the weekends and how it felt to stroll into dinner late after practice. She misses laughing in the library between classes and the familiarity of the crunch of the leaves between her feet, somehow so different from the same effect here.

She’s glad she doesn’t have to miss Han.

* * *

They fly out of Boston Logan together for Thanksgiving, Luke manages to get a flight coming in to Reagan within the same hour and Leia’s not one step off the plane before she’s high-tailing it twenty-nine gates further away from baggage claim before she’s anxiously waiting near the ticketing counter, her backpack bouncing as she fidgets nervously. Han is reminded this is the longest they’ve ever been away from each other, and suddenly he feels small, selfish. He’s seen Leia every other weekend and more than once when he couldn’t handle not getting in his car and driving for an hour to meet her for dinner. Luke’s been in New York since mid-August.

Luke steps out of the tunnel early on, a purple NYU sweatshirt on and a wide brimmed hat that screams New York hipster. Something in the pit of Han’s stomach squirms at the visual representation that three months is in fact enough time for someone to change that much.

The house feels light and airy and homey in all the ways it has before, big and bright, the blue shutters feeling inviting and caring. They smoke away the afternoon on the big sectional in the basement, and while technically, all the elements of his life before are present, it is so very clear that it is no longer that.

Luke somehow found his way into doing a tech apprenticeship on a TISCH production. Leia’s Freshman seminar is organizing a protest against troops in Syria for sometime before finals. Luke opened a Tinder account and met a boy in Washington Square Park at two in the morning just to talk. Leia had lunch with the captain of the debate team last week and is so excited about the season Han’s already heard this particular story four or five times. He closes his eyes and lets his head fall against the top of the sofa, listening, living.

Han doesn’t have much to say himself. He finished one half semester course with a good enough grade. Sometimes he gets dinner with his suitemates. He sees the clients he picked up during orientation before the parties start on Fridays and then he goes straight to Providence. He hasn’t put any roots down anywhere but with the two people in this room, whose roots were with each other long before he came into the picture, and who are putting down new ones he can’t touch.

The three of them retire upstairs around one, after Luke’s been dangerously close to nodding off on the couch for nearly an hour. He hugs them both and Han’s reminded just how much he loves this kid.

His head hits the pillow, the cold air comes through the open window, and Han feels so much different than the last night he spent in this room. He had forgotten just how much could change in only a few weeks.

“You awake?” Leia’s voice whispers from his other side, and Han opens an eye to see her turned on her side, her head propped up on her hand and staring at him with those big bright eyes.

“‘could be,” he mutters. She grins. They kiss. He forgets to feel less than whole. She’s soft and warm and surrounds him in every way he’s desperate for. He’s pricklingly aware of each element of nostalgia as skin touches skin and he’s brought back to Thanksgiving three years prior. The same night in the same bed, but with versions of themselves with younger faces and terrified hands.

Han’s proud of all the ways they’ve grown, the memories they’ve made, the people they’ve become. Somehow he still wishes he could go back and do it all again.

* * *

They don’t see each other for three weeks after that.

Leia’s on lockdown in preparation for finals. The four hours of sleep turn into two, naps stolen in the libraries and more than once Luke’s mentioned to Han how she’s texted home asking for more money to be put into her account just to keep her in coffee.

Han approaches his mountain of work to catch up on with an entire case of red bull and a bottle of adderall.

They get through the semester. They get through Christmas. They make it to the New Year as almost entirely new people.

The rumble of the D train sounds like music to Leia’s liquor soaked mind. It’s nearly 4 am on what’s now New Year’s Day, and at some point after leaving some loft in Park Slope owned by some guy Han knew from some placement at some point in his early teens, they manage to score seats by the door.

“You hear back from Luke yet?” he mutters, eyes clenched in an attempt to block out the glaring yellow light.

“He’s still at that party with the Fordham guy,” Leia responds. She clicks the lock button on her phone to read over his last text.

There’s a chime as the doors open and a swarm of people exit only to be replaced.

“I liked your friends,” she says. “Think I maybe spoke to one over Skype at some point.” She’s quiet, then, “I can’t believe we never came back here together.”

“ ‘didn’t wanna go back,”

* * *

The first week in February she cuts her hair off.

One of her friends does it for her on a whim in the bathroom of their hall. Leia feels giddy, it bounces just above her chin and she takes to braiding two strands together to form a twist in the back.

She sends Han countless photos and he praises the ever living fuck out of each and every one of them. It’s tied with the blue satin ribbon she took to wearing nearing his senior prom, and something in his chest aches. He didn’t realize she still had it. Somehow he didn’t think she would.

She looks hot, he tells her. She looks older, more professional. He can’t wait to see it in person.

He cries on and off for two days.

It's stupid and meaningless and his reaction makes him feel all kinds of terrible, but her too-long hair and numerous ways in which she found to pull it back were a staple of the girl he knew. Such a visible, obvious display of how she’s changed only reminds him to feel left behind.

He picks her up at the train station she kisses him when she gets in the car, giddy and hopeful, shoving her coat under her feet and adjusting a brown corduroy blazer Han notes is also new.

They end up in an italian restaurant neither of them should be spending the money on, flash the fake-id’s he acquired for them years ago now, when she wanted to go to a show in Portland her junior year. The wine is good and the food is lovely and they do not talk about their lack of a plan for the upcoming holiday.

* * *

It’s out of his mouth before he even realizes its a thought

“Do you want to break up?”

He poses it like a question. She’s the one who gets control, always.

_“We have put way too much time and effort into this for you to walk away now.” “I’m giving you the option.” “We are not breaking up and that’s final why would you even say something like that I-”_

She’s screaming at him, she’ll run dry.

He’ll kiss her just to calm her down, to shut her up.

“Ok ok ok I’m sorry I’m sorry-” he repeats. She looks at him, and blinks. “Why would you even say that?”

* * *

Han never slept when he first moved to Readfield.

It was too _quiet._ He lived in a hall with two faculty families and 45 other boys, ages 14 and 15, and yet lights out came and it was almost eerie. He would lay awake in his dirty, shared paradise, knowing this is the best it’s ever been. The lampost diagonal to his window shone through the blinds. The loudest noise being a few crickets.

He used to think, all those years ago when he’d fall asleep instead in rooms with as many as five other boys, that what he really wanted was some peace and quiet. He moves to Maine and suddenly the sounds of the city no longer protect him. He no longer hears a bustle of the crowds moving through the night, the whir of a cab driving by, a siren just to let him know he is _alive_.

Han never quite gets used to the silence. He simply builds a new home, with new indications of what is safe. He settles. He moves to Boston, and he realizes, he misses the silence.

* * *

It doesn’t fail to dawn on Leia that her entire life has been leading up to this year.

The plan was always private school, extracurriculars and leadership roles, SAT subject tests year after year after year, ten applications to ten of the most prestigious schools in the world.

Except, that was never the whole story.

She had gotten into Choate. She had gotten into Deerfield. She tells people she picked a mid-level school because they had given her a partial scholarship, and they had, but Luke was never going to be able to get into those schools anyway, and neither of them quite knew how to be alone.

Leia had complained to her friends from home when Luke sprung at dinner the November of their eighth grade year, that he too had started an SAO even though Leia _knows_ it took him two retakes of the ISEE to get into the school they attended at the time. She _knows_ he’d never have even considered leaving home if she hadn’t announced her plans and scared him into anti-abandonment retcon.

She also knows that if he hadn’t gone with her, they’d both be entirely different people.

Prep school, AP tests, recommendations, put it all towards your future, sure. Those aren’t the things you’re taking to college and into young adulthood.

Leia’s pitted against a Harvard sophomore in her first regional debate and she remembers being named Secretary General for Maine State Model UN, how the title and visible success had her almost skipping for weeks.

She has a particularly good conversation with her writing seminar professor, and thinks about the way the wind felt against the tips of her ears when she walked down the hill to meet with her math teacher while they were on duty her second week of high school classes.

She attends Lessons and Carols with two girls from her hall and she can almost feel Han standing next to her at the oh so similar Vespers service five years ago now, in the early moments of when they first started seeing eye to eye. `

* * *

Without noticing it really, Han starts speaking up in his classes, he realizes he might have actually retained the study habits drilled into him in high school. Take notes in class. Ask stupid questions but phrase them intricately so nobody notices. Start studying at 8pm and find people in your classes to swap flash-cards with until you ends up on the couch in a lounge in a dorm you don’t live in watching a movie you were supposed to have seen in your very limited childhood with upperclassmen who seem to value your company rather than just the eighth in your coat pocket.

Roll a blunt and pass it around the dimly lit lounge. Open the windows and shove a towel under the door and smile because this is something you’ve always been able to bring to the table with little effort and great reward and maybe it should bother you that it’s easier to smoke someone out than get to know them but it’s a good start.

(Pretend not to notice the Sophomore making eyes at you. Text your girlfriend instead. Feel overwhelmingly grounded when she responds, and thankful that she still is.

 _“Come over”_ she’ll say.

You get in your car without so much as a second thought. In not much more than an hour you are in her embrace. She’ll smell of artificial japanese cherry blossom and home, wherever it may be other than apparently right here.

You go down on her just because you can. She writhes and shakes and breathes, and you can’t imagine a world where these moments don’t exist.

She reads from a book of poetry that may be for a class as you drift to sleep and you know in a heartbeat that you would trade all of those moments for these ones.)

* * *

Typically, Sampson Bryant alumnus who don’t live in Maine won’t return to campus until the subsequent gradation, if at all.

Luke however goes up for the spring musical and won’t shut up in their group chat.

**guys. guys.**

**the bricks look SO GOOD.**

**and they’re really enhanced by the blood stain 50 feet away from when scraped my knee trying to run back into wesleyan freshman year after S O M E O N E got me to sneak out. GUYS**

Leia looks at the photo of their class bricks along the long pathway. There is a small victory in seeing her name laid in the ground after walking over all the names that came before her for four years, a sense of pride and comradery at her class being all together for as long as they rest. She misses it, but she does not want to go back.

“He knows there were more interesting things to do for his spring break than go back to his high school for a shitty musical right?” Han asks, tossing the phone on his bed.

“I’m not even sure he’s getting homework,” Leia deadpans.

There is a knock on the door. Han jumps. A guy from his linguistics seminar whos name Han never bothered to remember but who seems to know his tells them there’s a group going out for dim sum.

They grab their coats because why not.

* * *

_“So how did you guys meet?”_

My brother accidentally adopted him when he joined the hockey team winter of our freshman year of high school and it just sort of spiraled.

“We went to high school together,” Leia says instead.

They agree to push their way into a club somewhere on Stuart street. Someone buys a round of drinks, Han and Leia clink their matching hot pink cocktails together. Then blue ones. By the time someones ordered a round of champagne they’ve both lost track of the glasses that have been cleared away.

They take the long walk back to Kennedy Hall, the April weather finally worthy of being in the night air. The red brick looks familiar to Leia, New England is New England is New England. The sounds are different. The sheer volume of building after building, the feeling of an endless unknown. She manages to stay upright, ducks into the 7-11 on the corner for two bottles of water and hands one to Han.

“What was the deal the other night?” she asks. Han’s brow furrows. He cocks his head in question.

“Like -” Leia stumbles over her words, paused and apprehensive. Scared to break the spell, to put an end to an almost blessed fortnight without conflict. “Why did you want to break up?”

Han pushes his hair out of his face and unscrewed the water bottle before taking a long swig.

“I didn’t, I don’t.”

She waits for him to continue. A cab with its lights off wooshes past and the wind touches up against her neck.

“It’s just, I- I know it’s not your fault and the higher you go you know, the more I - convince myself, I guess, I’m getting left behind,”he rambles through.

Leia screws the cap back on her water bottle and sticks it in her jacket pocket before reaching out to link their arms. Han lets himself follow her lead as she continues along their way.

“I was thinking the other day about how two years ago I was trying to get you to go to college in like, California, and then we ended up going to schools an hour from each other,” she says. Han stays silent. Leia continues. “And it wasn’t even like, me trying to push you away, it’s just I always had this idea that like, there was a plan and things then were temporary and if I tried too hard to bring them into adulthood I couldn’t have the things I wanted longer, or more, or whatever.”

He listens to her ramble in a way she so rarely does, and tries not to take every word like a punch to the gut, specifically. It’s not about him.

“Do you feel settled yet? At Northeastern?” she asks him.

Han blinks. He considers. “I’m starting to, I think.”

Leia nods thoughtfully. “I don’t feel like Brown is mine yet,” she says. “Not like Sampson was.”

“It took you maybe a year to settle in there too though, remember?”

Leia humms. “Yeah,” she says, finally. “You’re right.”

* * *

Han’s last final is on a Wednesday. Leia’s on a Thursday afternoon. They split a storage unit with a girl in Leia’s orientation group and drive straight back up to school, for the first time in a calendar year.

The drive is familiar, though the places aren’t. Leia recognises the big blue sign on the bridge to Medford, but cannot remember the name of the student in Han’s class who ended up there. She remembers the long strip of time past where she would exit for the Dover store in New Hampshire, but doesn’t know what the town looks like past the three tack stores she frequented with the Equestrian team.

They’re invited to stay with one of the day students who were on the hockey team with Han and Luke along with a few other kids who came back for graduation. According to the groupchat Luke is already there and unpacked. Han and Leia keep driving until they pull up to the 19th century brick monument that whispers to them secrets of both personal and overarching histories.

Han parks in the faculty lot because who’s gonna tell him no? The car doors slam and the gravel crunches beneath their feet and they wordlessly and simultaneously reach for each others hands, letting the other be their tether to reality.

“It _smells_ like home,” Han says quietly.

“Yeah,” Leia agrees. They stop for a moment and look up at the bell tower. “Do you think anything of ours will still be standing in a hundred and forty years?”

“I don’t know,” Han replies. “I don’t know if it has to.”

The heavy creak of the door and the slam behind them makes Han feel safe. The excited waves when they walk into the office make him feel loved. The girl at his side makes him feel whole.

* * *

“Do you ever wish we could go back?” Leia asks.

It is dark and the door is closed and the windows are open and Luke is snoring softly on an air mattress on the floor.

Han shifts and lets his chin rest on her shoulder, holding on just a little bit tighter. “Yes,” he admits, “but I’m proud of who we are now, for what it’s worth.”

Leia ducks her nose into his neck, and breathes. “Yeah. Me too.”


End file.
